The stadium is the home of the Softbank Hawks baseball team
and is being offered on loan, the phone company said in a
statement on its website. The Yahoo! Dome, which opened in April
1993 as Japan’s first stadium with a retractable roof, is also
used for events including concerts, according to the website of
Hawks Town, which has a floor area of 176,000 square meters.

The stadium is sold as Japan’s real estate market recovers
from last year’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Tokyo’s office
vacancy rates fell last month, according to Miki Shoji Co. The
Real Estate Economic Research Institute’s data showed the number
of condominiums offered for sale in the city climbed 13 percent,
while government said land prices rebounded in the country’s
northeast region affected by the temblor.

“The property market in Japan seems to have bottomed
out,” said Vasu Menon, a vice president of wealth management at
Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. “We’ve seen so many false dawns
in Japan, it’s difficult to say whether that’s going to be
sustained.”

Usage Fee

GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund that manages more
than $100 billion, acquired the Fukuoka Hawks Town in 2007, Mah Lay Choon, a spokeswoman at the company, said in an e-mailed
response to queries. The property consists of the stadium
designed with the Roman Coliseum motif, the 1,052-room Hilton
Fukuoka Seahawk hotel and the Hawks Town Mall.

“The purchase will eliminate the annual usage fee of 5
billion yen that we’ve been paying to the GIC,” Takeaki Nukii,
a Softbank spokesman, said by phone from Tokyo on March 24. “It
also allows us to refurbish the facility as we like.”

GIC said in July when it released its annual report that it
boosted investments in emerging economies to tap their
potentially higher returns. The fund, the biggest investor in
companies including Citigroup Inc. (C) and UBS AG, seeks to boost
assets to tackle crises and meet the city-state’s long-term
spending needs. GIC’s ranked the world’s eighth-largest state
investment company by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute.

Emerging-market stocks made up 15 percent of GIC’s holdings
from 10 percent a year earlier, while those in developed
economies fell to 34 percent from 41 percent, it said in the
report. So-called alternative investments were little changed at
26 percent of its portfolio, with real estate increased to 10
percent from 9 percent, it said.

Promoting Business

Softbank said when it agreed to buy the Hawks in 2004 that
it expected Internet content related to the team to help promote
its business as it was Japan’s baseball champion in the previous
year. Softbank sold 65 billion yen of bonds in 2009, naming the
issue Fukuoka Softbank Hawks Bond after the team.

Softbank, the first carrier to sell Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone in
Japan, is also increasing its investment in technology. It said
March 1 it will increase equipment spending by 100 billion yen
after receiving a new spectrum license allowing it to expand
data capacity.